The Last Days of Newgate pm-1

by Andrew Pepper

  ‘Folk are bored with material like Life in London. They want the real thing. That’s why Vidocq’s memoirs are selling so well. They’re calling him the first detective.’

  ‘People like Vidocq because he’s a rogue.’

  ‘Exactly, dear boy.’ Godfrey smiled. ‘You wouldn’t have to write it yourself. I’d get a proper writer, not one of those horrible balladeers. You wouldn’t have to write the damn thing or even put your own name to it.’

  ‘I value anonymity.’

  ‘Ha, that’s why you walk into any tavern in the city and people sink into their seats or crawl up the walls.’

  ‘I don’t want my life becoming public property.’

  ‘It’s not as if I’d expect you to tell me the truth, dear boy. My readers don’t give a damn about the truth. They just want a good story with someone they can cheer for. We could even make you look good.’ He glanced at Pyke and shrugged. ‘Or bad, if you wanted to be bad. Good or bad. Just not both at the same time. It confuses people. They can’t work out whether to shout for the man or rail against him.’

  ‘You know what my answer’s going to be. I don’t know why you bother to ask. .’

  Godfrey nodded glumly. ‘It gives you some indication of how bad things are.’ He went to fill his glass from the jug but noticed it was empty. ‘I assume you’ve read about the murders in St Giles? It’s an awful business, I know, but if I could somehow get my hands on that story, well, it would sell like hot pies. Times like this, people need answers and explanations. You should’ve heard some of the preposterous tales that folk are spinning. One lad thought it was King Herod, returning to finish the job, another reckoned it was the vengeful ghost of Queen Caroline. These weren’t the brightest minds, you’ll understand.’

  Pyke thought about not telling his uncle about his involvement in the events of the previous few days, beginning with the discovery of the bodies, fearing it might lead to a torrent of unwanted questions. But Godfrey would hear about it sooner or later and Pyke decided the news would be better coming from him.

  To his surprise, though, the first thing that his uncle did, once he had been told the whole story, was to touch Pyke gently on the knee, look him in the eye and ask how he was bearing up.

  Pyke had always felt it necessary to guard against his uncle’s attempts to solicit favours from him. Yet as he looked into Godfrey’s guileless eyes, he couldn’t help but feel moved by the concern in them. Pyke started to open his mouth, but the extent to which recent events had unsettled him suddenly made him feel weak and the words wouldn’t come. He thanked Godfrey for his concern and assured him everything would be fine.

  Godfrey shrugged as though he did not believe Pyke. ‘That other business you were asking about. You know.

  Lord Edmonton. I did a little digging.’

  In the strains of the past few days, Pyke had almost forgotten about Edmonton and the robberies. He made a mental note not to overlook Swift and the question of what had taken him to the St Giles lodging house in the first place.

  ‘It would appear that Edmonton’s estate is in some trouble. The usual thing: the cost of maintenance outstripping the yield from rents. You mentioned his brother William, the banker. My source claimed that the brother’s bank has been propping up Edmonton’s estate for a while and keeping the lord himself in clover. He hadn’t heard anything about the robberies, though. I’m afraid I can’t help you there.’

  Pyke thought about Hambledon Hall, Edmonton’s shabby country estate, and about the strange act he’d witnessed, the two brothers openly bickering in front of him, Edmonton silencing his apparently weaker sibling.

  ‘For what it’s worth, I also heard that Edmonton is tight with the King’s brother, the Duke of Cumberland. Damn nasty piece of work, that one. I’d be wary of anyone who claimed him as a friend.’ Godfrey proceeded to regale Pyke with stories that he had already heard. Apparently Cumberland had once raped Lady Lyndhurst; he had also driven Lord Graves to suicide, possibly raped his own sister and, on one occasion, having received a blow on the head in the middle of the night from his valet in a botched assassination attempt, Cumberland had, according to some accounts, slit the man’s throat and then convinced the authorities his valet had committed suicide. Godfrey also repeated rumours to the effect that Cumberland was engaged in a dastardly plot to poison the young Princess Victoria in order to steal the crown for himself and safeguard the Protestant ascendancy.

  Godfrey pulled down his wine-stained shirt to cover his girth. ‘You also asked about the mother.’ He watched Pyke suspiciously. ‘And the daughter.’

  Pyke nodded but said nothing.

  ‘The daughter, Emily, is an acquaintance of Elizabeth Fry. She’s a committed reformer or an interfering do-gooder, depending on your point of view. They visit prisons, asylums and even factories, and write reports as a way of pressuring the authorities to improve conditions. Most of ’em are your wearisome God-bothering types, motivated by the usual nonsense about bringing the poor to the Lord, as though prayer and a few homilies about the Almighty will put food in their stomachs. Apparently this one doesn’t do the work for the glory of God. I asked Reverend Foote about her. As the Ordinary, he knows her quite well. He doesn’t much care for the reforming type but he told me something you might find interesting. Edmonton is not the kind of man who would readily allow his only unmarried daughter even the tiniest smidgen of freedom or the financial support to carry out work he, no doubt, regards as unbecoming.’

  Pyke affected a frown. ‘What are you telling me?’

  ‘Well,’ Godfrey said, enjoying himself, ‘at the time of their marriage, control of the Hambledon estate, as the law demands, passed from wife to husband, but I’m told that the marriage settlement included a number of unusual provisions. A certain sum of money was settled on their future offspring by trust. I don’t know if the wife had doubts about Edmonton’s character even then but, at the time, he wasn’t in any position to dictate terms. You see, Lord Edmonton was by no means a member of the landed gentry in those days. He was only titled as a result of his connections with Tories like Eldon and Winchelsea.’ Godfrey tapped his nose. ‘The old man, it would appear, has little power to prevent his daughter from doing what she damn well likes with her income and, I’m told, it’s driven him nearly to the point of apoplexy she has chosen to use it in the manner she has.’

  Pyke thought about Emily Blackwood and the violent argument with her father he had overheard. But he was also preoccupied by something else, something that had been on his mind for the entire day, something that related to the living arrangements of the deceased and their missing cousin.

  First thing in the morning, he would pay a visit to number four Whitehall Place and examine what had been removed from the lodging house.

  SEVEN

  But the following morning, Pyke found himself standing outside the entrance to Newgate prison, waiting for Emily Blackwood to finish a conversation she was having with the Reverend Arthur Foote. Though he had walked past the prison, just a short distance from his gin palace, on numerous occasions since his visit to Hambledon Hall, this was the first time he had come across Emily. Pyke stared up at the building’s blackened stone-clad exterior.

  There were other prisons in London but Newgate remained the most notorious. In the past, Pyke had visited the interior of the prison, mostly in order to elicit information from convicts, and found it to be a depressing but unremarkable place. Others, however, did not share his ambivalence. To them, the prison would always represent a system of justice that was as brutal as it was unfair.

  They were standing almost directly outside Debtors’ Door, from where condemned men and women emerged on the day of their execution and began their last journey to the scaffold. Pyke watched Foote shuffle across the street in the direction of the King of Denmark pub, a cabman’s watering hole that occupied a three-storey tenement building directly opposite the prison.

  In the middle of the previous century, public hangings had be
en moved from the open spaces of Tyburn to the more confined areas surrounding Newgate and, indeed, other prisons in the city, in the hope that this might restrict crowd sizes and turn the events themselves into more sober occasions. This hope had not come to pass; what had happened instead was that the same multitude now thronged into the narrow streets surrounding Newgate on hanging days, at a risk to themselves and others. Pyke’s own father had found this out, to his cost. Old Bailey was a street of ghosts. Pyke thought about the hundreds, perhaps thousands, who had died in these environs, either inside or outside the prison walls, and of the throng who went there to witness people hang. He did not believe such people did so either to be entertained or reminded that the justice system worked. Watching another man die was essentially a way of clinging on to what little humanity you had left that had not been taken away by the city.

  As he approached her, Pyke waved to attract Emily’s attention.

  ‘This is a surprise, Mr Pyke, and a very pleasant one.’ They shook hands as etiquette demanded and she smiled warmly, revealing dimples on either side of her mouth. Up close, her teeth were a brilliant white and in the weak morning sunlight her hair, which sat just above her shoulders, glistened. She made a comment about the weather, pointed out that it was cold enough for them to see their own breath, and said, ‘Imagine how it must be for those inside the prison without access to heat.’

  Though his grooming regime consisted only of shaving on every third day, changing his outfit weekly and his underwear twice weekly and bathing irregularly, he found himself self-consciously arranging his hair in some imaginary mirror.

  ‘I am about to visit the quadrangle allocated to the female prisoners. Perhaps you would care to accompany me?’

  The last thing Pyke wanted to do was witness the squalor and misery endured by Newgate’s unfortunates, but he found himself accepting her invitation. She seemed pleased by his decision and later, once the formalities had been taken care of and they were standing in a small courtyard inside the prison, she told him their society had been trying to impress upon the Ordinary and the gaoler the nature of their responsibilities to the prisoners. The gaoler should visit all parts of the prison and see every prisoner on a daily basis and the Ordinary should perform a daily religious service and visit the sick. Of course, this did not happen. She laughed bitterly.

  Pyke said Foote was more famous for his powers of consumption than for his pulpit oratory. This time her laugh seemed almost flirtatious.

  The prison was smaller than Pyke had remembered but its fortress-like buildings, cramped together in an almost piecemeal fashion owing to the lack of space, and the sheer granite walls that stood guard over the maze of concealed courtyards and passages inside the prison, revived his fear of confined spaces.

  It was a crisp day but the washed-out blue sky was not visible, even from within the prison’s open courtyards, so steep were the walls and so cramped were the buildings. From within the blocks and wards, Pyke could hear the shouts and wails of the prison’s inhabitants.

  He tried to imagine what it might be like, to be held in such a place, with no access to the outside world.

  Emily seemed entirely at ease in their surroundings. She explained how the prison was laid out. She pointed to the north side where the debtors were housed and explained that they lived in relative comfort. They were visited by vendors who hawked newspapers and tobacco, potmen who sold pints of beer and local merchants who brought with them cold joints, fish and mince pies. The condemned, she explained, occupied the press-yard side of the prison. There were two dozen rooms and fifteen cells to accommodate eighty or ninety prisoners, many of whom were likely to be granted a reprieve or have their sentence commuted to transportation. Emily said children as young as twelve mixed freely with sodomists and murderers.

  In the press yard in front of the condemned wing, she pointed to a large movable scaffold. Pyke had spotted it already. The condemned man stood on a false floor with a noose around his neck, she explained, and on the executioner’s signal, it dropped, leaving him hanging in the air.

  Pyke said he had seen many executions and that their pointless barbarity never failed to shock him.

  ‘Really?’ she said, squinting, even though the sun could not penetrate the interior of the prison. ‘I would’ve imagined that their violence might have appealed to your baser instincts.’

  ‘And what baser instincts might those be?’

  This time Emily blushed. ‘Perhaps the ones that endow you with such self-confidence.’

  ‘You think my confidence to be unfounded?’

  ‘Not unfounded,’ she said, looking away, half-smiling. ‘But I fancy you wield it as one might a weapon.’

  ‘What sort of a weapon?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, still affecting a smile.

  ‘A rapier, perhaps?’

  ‘I was thinking more of a bludgeon.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Then perhaps you are mistaking confidence for heavy-handedness. For I would not consider myself to be confident.’ He waited to catch her stare. ‘Especially not around you.’

  She looked away quickly. ‘In any case, I would have imagined punishment better suits your world than reform.’

  ‘Quite,’ Pyke said, grinning now. ‘Let’s return to the safer subject of barbaric violence.’ He made to wipe something from his eye. Above him, a crow was circling in the small patch of sky still visible from within the prison walls. ‘Just because I believe the only way of subduing any power is through the exercise of a greater power doesn’t necessarily mean I find such a state of affairs appealing.’

  ‘That’s quite a bleak view of human nature, isn’t it? The weak being torn apart by the strong and the strong being torn apart by the stronger.’

  Nodding, despite himself, he found her instinctive grasp of his position impressive. He had never tried to have a similar conversation with Lizzie.

  ‘I would’ve thought that description perfectly fits what’s happening inside this prison.’ Pyke pointed towards the condemned block.

  ‘But that’s exactly it,’ she said, excited. ‘At present, that’s how these unfortunates are treated and so they act as animals. Wouldn’t you?’ Her eyes glistened with enthusiasm. ‘But what if they were treated differently? What if they lived in separate cells, had access to proper clothes, hot food, time to exercise and read, a routine, bedsteads provided for them? Might they act in a more humane way themselves?’

  ‘You believe people are essentially altruistic?’ Pyke tried to keep scepticism from his voice.

  ‘Call me simple-minded but I believe that a tendency for goodness exists within all of us. Even you.’ Then Emily did something that surprised him: she threaded her arm through his and said, ‘Come with me. I’ll show you the quadrangle allocated to women.’

  All Pyke said was, ‘I would not have called you simple-minded. ’

  She did not release his arm.

  The space for female prisoners awaiting trial was limited to two cells and two large wards. Something like three hundred women and children were crowded into these rooms. The fact that the female prisoners were now overseen by a female gatekeeper was the result of pressure exerted by their committee, Emily explained, as the gatekeeper led them along a thick-walled passage to one of the two main wards. From the entrance, and protected from the ward by iron bars, Pyke watched the scene in front of him with fascination and horror. He counted ninety or a hundred people crammed into a room no larger than Sir Richard Fox’s office. Some wore rags. Others were naked. The only warmth in the ward was provided by the inhabitants themselves. They huddled together in small groups. The smell of unwashed bodies and stale alcohol made him want to gag. A little girl, no more than ten, caught his eye. Her lackadaisical body and hollow stare spoke of a hopelessness that seemed so all-encompassing he had to look away. These were the human dregs, criminals perhaps but with their own explanatory tales of woe and despair, and Pyke didn’t want to be among them — to have
to see and smell them.

  ‘Though it might seem hard to believe, considerable improvements have been made since Mrs Fry first visited here fifteen years ago. There’s now better ventilation and lighting, fixed bed places, a new dining room and dining tables, an enlarged infirmary and a new wash house.’

  Pyke said he had seen enough.

  Outside in the yard, Emily said, ‘When we talked at the hall, I got the impression you thought all reformers to be either petty meddlers or well-meaning tyrants wanting to transform the world in their own image. What we are trying to do here is rather small. Desks for the condemned, the removal of rubbish once a week.’

  Pyke admired her forthright nose and hazel eyes. Emily did not seem out of place inside Newgate’s walls. She was part of this world and, in a strange way, it suited her.

  ‘Perhaps not you,’ he said, choosing his words carefully, ‘but others have grander visions.’

  ‘And what’s wrong with grand visions?’ she asked, quickly. ‘Even to me, Newgate isn’t just a prison. It’s a word that’s become synonymous with a whole system of justice, a barbaric and arbitrary one in which the educated and privileged escape punishment because of who they are and who they know and the poor are killed regardless. You asked me why I did this. Let me ask you a question in return. Is it right or fair that one prisoner should have a good flock mattress, a double allowance of provisions, an endless supply of ale and prostitutes when required, while another, equally deserving prisoner is beaten, abused, starved and left to die?’

  Pyke waited until he had her full attention. ‘People who can’t help themselves come from all ranks and stations. Even aristocratic families.’

  Her surprise registered before her anger and she recoiled from him, as though he had slapped her. ‘Men always imagine power is tied only to social class,’ she said, recovering some of her composure.

  ‘You mean, your father’s power is more a product of his masculine position?’

  ‘Is that such a surprise to you? That men like my father have been shaping the world to fit their needs for centuries?’